Cut’n’Paste, Search’n’Replace November 9, 2009

Or, “The errors that appear in the newspapers due to careless computer aided editing”.

It’s so common now to see errors in the paper due to an over reliance of the spell checker. The majority of the people who are creating the content in the paper either cannot spell, or have no idea about grammar. Too often, I see “there” instead of “their” or “they’re”, or “where” instead of “were” or “we’re” – they’re all spelled correctly, but are the wrong words.

This weekend, I read a recipe. (I won’t name the famous chef, but his name does lend itself nicely to a more appropriate version that describes his manner.) So, let’s say this recipe was for Beef Stroganoff, but the chef has altered it and now is using lamb instead of beef, so it’s now Lamb Stroganoff. Everything in the recipe is the same except for the meat. You’d think that a simple search would be done once the recipe had been typed up, just to check there were no instances of beef. No. The recipe starts out talking about the lamb, then refers to the beef in the middle of the recipe, then finishes off with lamb again.

Ok, fair enough, it’s not that hard to figure out. But what kind of quality is this? They couldn’t be arsed to do a simple search and replace to CHECK that they had made sure it said lamb all the way through the recipe.